Hi there
I just want to clarify my understanding of a lot. In the Baby Pips school section called ‘What is a Lot?’ it says that a Standard lot is 100,000 units and a mini lot is 10,000 units, etc.
So when it says units that means dollars, yen, pounds, euro’s etc. Is that right? So if I’m buying 1 mini lot of AUD/GBP then I’m buying 10,000 dollars of Australian dollars and Simultaneously selling 10,000 pounds…
Is that right??? Or am I confused.
Thanks a million.
Kylie
Heyy Kylie,
lot means a particular amount of units for an instrument. yes, standard lot is 100,000 units while mini lot is a 10,000 units. for the denominations, let me explain you this way-
let us take an example- if you talk about EURUSD, here the value currency is USD that means, its value is denominated in USD like its current rate is 1.1215 dollars. while the base currency is Euro that means the units are in Euros, if you buy 1 standard lot of EURUSD it means you are buying 100,000 units in Euros.
Thanks for your help…
In other words, in your example, you’re buying 100,000 Euro’s. And selling $100,000 USD’s???
Right???
I’m sorry to get so basic.
I emailed some information to my boyfriend from the Baby Pips school about lot sizes today. When we talked about it later he was saying that where it says ‘ a standard lot is 100,000 units’ it meant 100,000 pips. Ie: the word ‘units’ meant pips. Not whole dollars / Euro’s / Yen etc… like the stuff that you could pull out of your wallet.
Thanks a million.
Kylie
Your taken advice from your boyfriend to whom you have to email the info to first. Thats faith.
Alas its wrong wrong wrong. A lot is just a standard of measurement used to preform monetary calculations in relation to the finical product you are purchasing. Download a couple of brokers PDS and read carefully.
And if you do read carefully, you’ll see there’s no such beast as mini lots or nano lots. That’s just marketing use to lure us suckers with small accounts into the game
heyy Kylie,
sorry to say but it doesnt mean pips it actually means units like in euros or Yen etc. and buying 1 lot of EURUSD means we are going long on Euro and short on USD
:D:D Sad that I can’t shake your hand.
This is so truth.
No; [U]not[/U] right.
All you need to understand, here, to see how this works, is the exact meaning of “quote currency” and “base currency”.
This is the page that explains it. 
That’s just [U]totally[/U] wrong.
We can use high or low lots in trading .With more investment I use standard lot that is reasonable for profit taking. If I had less amount in capital I have to remain conscious to select lot. In micro accounts there are nano lots . They are for practice of real trading .We can not make much profit with so small lots.
Trading lots is so 20th century. Step into the 21st and trade with a dealer that offers single unit sizing.
-Adrian
+1 although lots do still have some positives
Oh no doubt. We just need to see more dealers offer that. Eyes on you Jason Rogers.
-Adrian
+1 that’s still missing at FXCM…would be a huge upgrade, jason…
Thanks guys, I’ll share your feedback with the higher ups.
Currently the minimum trade size with FXCM is 1000 currency units (AKA one micro lot) because that’s the smallest order size that can be offset one-for-one with liquidity providers on our No Dealing Desk (NDD) forex execution.
However, now that we offer Mini accounts as an alternative to our Standard NDD accounts, that may be a way for us to offer smaller trade sizes in the future. I’ll keep you posted. 
What’s single unit sizing?
With Oanda the smallest unit is 1…and you can trade any size, e.g. 134 or 1638, etc.